I’m early for my interview with Chris Ruen, author of Freeloading: How Our Insatiable Hunger for Free Content Starves Creativity, and going over my notes at the bar. Eventually I circle one question from my list, the inquiry I kept penning into the margins of my review copy: why do people believe music should be free?

Ruen never thought about the ethics surrounding downloading until he was directly confronted with the reverberations of its impact. He got a job slinging coffee in his Brooklyn neighborhood and began serving many of the local artists that filled your iPod a decade ago. Up until that point, like most of us, he had never thought much about the ethics behind downloading. It wasn’t until he began hearing their stories, the inability of many popular musicians to make ends meet, that he began realizing the contours of the debate were completely skewed. “I pirated hundreds of songs during my college years,” he writes, “but I sensed disposability and devaluation infecting my relationship with music.”

Ruen’s book is a detailed look at his own personal relationship with the music industry, as well as an investigation into how and why our culture views the practice as it does. He interviews the very artists whose lives influenced his shift in thinking. “I don’t know why the angry armchair quarterbacks would pick this issue,” the Hold Steady’s Craig Finn tells Ruen, “…music is being separated from the rest of commerce.”

snip:

Of course it’s great that so many different kinds of music are now readily available and people around the world can be readily exposed to them, but what about all the great bands who were forced to break up, over the course of the last decade, because they couldn’t afford to keep making music? Why do indie-rock fans, and websites, loudly celebrate Record Store Day, instead of simply encouraging people to buy more records? You vote with your dollar, the saying goes and, yet, the cliché holds no weight in the modern music industry.

snip:

Ruen believes the downloading phenomenon begins with an original sin and, subsequent, shoddy media analysis. “Napster wasn’t a company based upon revolution or innovation," he writes. "It was based upon opportunism, employing the legal protections of copyright when it suited them, ignoring them when it didn’t. The company wasn’t the band of young do-gooders some remember it as, but shrewd businessmen who sought to manipulate public opinion in order to expand their user base.”

This flawed vision of opportunistic revolutionaries continues to this day, “If we can agree that artists have legitimate rights to their own work," he says, "it follows that we have some duty as individuals and as a society to respect those rights—which means reasonable copyright enforcement. Online black markets, such as The Pirate Bay, deserve to be blacklisted.”

Technology in general has the largest cash hoard (overseas) of any sector, with $556 billion, or 38% of the total. The top five companies with the most cash are Apple, Microsoft, Google, Pfizer and Cisco, making up 24% of the total. They keep a larger portion overseas, since the report notes that the top 50 corporations with the most cash keep 63% of their hoard overseas.

Why are so many technology companies on top of the list? The answer is intellectual property, the end result of most technology endeavors. This is also a factor for drug-maker Pfizer, the only non-tech firm among the top five. Because intellectual property is intangible, it is much easier to move it—and any profits associated with it—overseas for tax purposes.

Good for Prince. He needs the twenty two milloin. No really he does. Principle folks. Why not. Heck why not 100 million per offense. Wrong is wrong and the people that commited the wrong doing can afford it. Think big Prince or Price. Why not throw them in jail for decades or life. Take them out of society in the name of stealing music/film or whatever product. There are millions Oh never mind.

He's a singer who has made some odd career moves in his time, from changing his name to an unpronounceable love symbol to scrawling "slave" on his cheek in protest at his record company.

But industry experts yesterday warned that Prince's latest decision might be the most controversial of all.

He has threatened to sue thousands of his biggest fans for breach of copyright, provoking an angry backlash and claims of censorship.

His lawyers have forced his three biggest internet fansites to remove all photographs, images, lyrics, album covers and anything linked to the artist's likeness. A legal letter asks the fansites to provide "substantive details of the means by which you propose to compensate our clients [Paisley Park Entertainment Group, NPG Records and AEG] for damages".

The singer himself is believed to take a close interest in unofficial use of his image and music, monitoring websites from his sprawling Paisley Park studio complex in Minneapolis.

Call him the artist formerly known as "Plaintiff" ... 'cause TMZ has learned Prince has officially DROPPED his $22 MILLION lawsuit against 22 "bootleggers" who allegedly posted footage of his concerts online.

Prince has only filed the original lawsuit less than 2 weeks ago ... going after 22 anonymous bloggers (for $1 mil-a-piece) who posted concert footage on Facebook and other websites without Prince's permission.

But after news of the lawsuit went public ... it only took a few days before Prince decided to end his crusade on the bootleggers.

Why are search companies, like Google, so determined to maintain the status quo? The answer is simple. For all the claims about innovation and the power of the Internet to drive our ailing economy, the Internet is totally dependent upon content. Without it, they simply have warehouses filled with empty servers and endless bandwidth. The key to their explosive financial growth is dependent upon unlimited, cheap access to quality content.